Linux Gaming

Earlier this week I delivered some 13-way AMD open-source Linux GPU benchmarks when tested against Valve's Source Engine powered Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Source games. Now up for testing from the Steam Linux client on Ubuntu is the Intel open-source Mesa graphics driver performance with Core i7 "Haswell" graphics.

For those curious how Valve's popular Team Fortress 2 game is performing atop the Source Engine with Ubuntu 13.10 and the latest NVIDIA Linux drivers, here's updated benchmarks as we compare nine graphics cards spanning several GeForce generations.

Continuing in the exclusive coverage of the yet-to-be-released Unigine Valley, here are some initial performance results for this visually-amazing multi-platform tech demo / benchmarks when using the OpenGL 3.2 Core renderer on Ubuntu Linux. A range of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were used for this initial testing of Unigine Valley. There's also benchmarks in this article of Unigine Heaven 4.0, which was just released yesterday.

Unigine Corp will be announcing next week the release of Unigine Valley 1.0 and the 4.0 update to their very popular cross-platform Unigine Heaven technology demo. Unigine Valley is an incredibly beautiful tech demo of the Unigine Engine coming to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems. In this article is an exclusive preview of Unigine Valley as well as the significant Unigine Heaven 4.0 update.

With Valve Software's ambitious plans for Linux, they have just picked up another Linux development all-star. Their latest hire has been working on Linux games for more than a decade, is a former Loki Software developer, and he's the creator of SDL.

Within the Phoronix Forums and elsewhere it has been brought up that using a low-latency kernel can improve the Linux gaming performance, but is this really the case? In this article are some simple benchmarks comparing the stock Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "generic" Linux kernel compared to Ubuntu's low-latency flavor of Linux.

Here's an interesting finding: at least when running under Wine, Half-Life 2 is faster on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver than when running on the proprietary Catalyst driver. There are also some other similar results where these Windows games have the advantage when running on the Gallium3D open-source driver.

After a week of interesting Valve Linux news on Phoronix, Friday afternoon there was a special Linux delivery at Valve's offices for their "Linux cabal" -- the team of Valve developers that are working to provide the Linux versions of the Steam client and various Source Engine-powered games natively on Linux.

For those that have doubted the exclusive Phoronix claims for quite a while now that the Steam client and Source Engine are in fact being ported to Linux, the doubts can be nearly laid to rest. Even I began to wonder how long it would take before the clients for their popular games would be publicly released under Linux. However, after confirming the information perhaps a bit too soon, their level of Linux interest is much more clear after spending a day at their offices. A meeting topped off the day with Gabe Newell regarding Linux where he sounded more like a Linux saint than an ex-Microsoft employee. Valve does have some great plans for Linux beyond just shipping the client versions of Steam and their popular games on the Source Engine.